HA Overview

The primary role of High Availability (HA) in vSphere environment is to restart VMs if a vSphere Host experiences as catastrophic failure. This could be caused by any number of issues such as power outage, and failure of multiple hardware components such that operation of the VM is impacted. VMware HA is part of number of “clustering” technologies including Distributed Resource Management (DRS) and Distributed Power Management – that intend to gather the individual resources of physical resources, and represent them as logical pool of resources that can be used to run virtual machines. Once the clustering technologies are enabled administrators a liberated from the constraints of the physical world, and the focus is less on the capabilities of an individual physical server, and more about the capacity and utilization of the cluster. HA is not the only availability technology available – once enabled administrator have the option to enabled “Fault Tolerance” on selected VMs that benefit from its features. In order for FT to be enabled, so must HA.

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